Angel's Ridge

1916 - Angel’s Ridge, Georgia

“Janie! All of you come away from there!” Mrs. Hoffman called from the sidewalk.

The children collectively sighed, each turning from their tasks and straining their necks over the thick vegetation of the garden to see if their teacher knew who was in the yard. Mrs. Hoffman stood there, her skirt drenched in the October mud, staring worriedly across the street.

“She always says my name,” Janie Jacobs muttered to the girls standing next to her.

“That’s because it’s always your idea,” one of them laughed, stepping around a bush to get a better view of their disgruntled guardian.

Janie stuck her tongue out at the girl. “Is not!”

“Oh, for God’s sake, children!” Mrs. Hoffman sighed, lifting her skirt to cross the mud-clotted street into the yard where her students roamed and pointed to a large tree just beyond the yard. “Get over there, all of you. Let’s go!” she ordered. “Honestly! Standing about in someone’s yard.”

“Oh, she don’t mind none, Missus,” one of the boys said, hopping over a boulder just in front of his teacher. “The widder,” he explained, “well, she’s crazy, Miss.”

Mrs. Hoffman’s usually demure face pinkened a bit as she grabbed the boy by his ear and pulled him from the sight of the large house centered in the yard. The group of children, all chattering in fascination about their teacher’s behavior, followed.

She stopped a couple of feet from the house, and turned as her students assembled into a group in front of her. “Is this something you’ve started, Miss Jacobs?” she said, her face’s color heightening in rage. She released the boy’s ear and without hesitation, he scrambled away, afraid to evoke her wrath again.

“Janie!” the teacher called again. “Come out here, now!” After a moment’s silence, Mrs. Hoffman picked up her skirts again, and marched straight up to the crowd of children. “I said, ‘now’.”

The group reluctantly drew back from the middle, revealing the fourteen-year-old Janie sitting on a boulder, toying with the hem of her once-white skirt. She innocently turned her large gray eyes up at the teacher and said softly, “Widow Barnes doesn’t see us there, ma’am. She stares out the window from the east gable all day, and don’t pay no–.” Janie shook her head slightly. “I mean, she doesn’t pay any mind to visitors.”

“Eighteen children roaming around in her yard are hardly ‘visitors’, Janie. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“But why, Mrs. Hoffman?” Janie asked, her large eyes beginning to glitter with fat, unshed tears.

“Oh, you stop that!” Mrs. Hoffman snapped. “Janie Jacobs doesn’t listen to any adult, much less cry over what one says.”

Janie’s eyes cleared almost instantly as she shot to her feet, her hands balled into fists at her sides. “Well, it’s not fair!” she yelled, her voice suddenly angry.

Mrs. Hoffman took a startled step back, but her eyes locked with Janie’s. “Children, go home,” she said, but when Janie started to rise, Mrs. Hoffman shook her head slowly. “Not you.”

Janie huffed and collapsed back onto the rock, dropping her face into her hands as the other children silently filed in different directions toward their homes.

“I won’t do it again,” she said. “The widow doesn’t care, but I still won’t do it again.”

Mrs. Hoffman sighed. “Janie, you have no way of knowing how Mrs. Barnes thinks about all of this.”

“She’s only a loon!” Janie smiled up at Mrs. Hoffman, but her smile fell at the teacher’s facial expression, which was humorless. “It’s just a bit of fun, Miss,” she muttered.

Mrs. Hoffman shook her head and to the shock of Janie, the tight-laced teacher eased onto the flat stone next to her. “I wonder what your mother would have said to that logic.”

Janie looked down. “She probably would hate me for it, and how horribly I’ve turned out.”

Mrs. Hoffman sighed again, louder than before. “No, she most certainly would not hate you, but she would be disappointed in your behavior.” When Janie didn’t respond, she continued. “I’m sure Mrs. Barnes doesn’t appreciate it either.”

Janie’s head popped up. “But she can’t . . . I mean, she doesn’t–.”

“Oh no, I assure you she does. I spent a whole summer living in that very house when I was a girl, under the charge of Abigail Barnes.”

Janie gasped. “Were you very afraid of the old woman, and how she never leaves that window? It’s all very spooky, I say, very spooky indeed.”

“She wasn’t all that old when I was young, Janie, and even though she was a widow then, everyone simply called her Miss Abigail. She had two little girls that went to school with me. Their names were Clara and Fauna.”

“So why don’t they take care of her?” Janie said. “Make her come away from that window. If she didn’t stand there night and day, people wouldn’t call her crazy.”

Mrs. Hoffman took a moment to answer, then slowly, as if she were weighing her words, she said, “they died many years ago. Both of them.”

“What happened?”

Mrs. Hoffman nodded. “That’s why I kept you here. I thought you should know.” She took a deep breath before continuing. “There were four of us that summer, four girls, my sister Janice and me, and then Clara and Fauna Barnes. Janice and Fauna were fifteen, and Clara and I were twelve.

“Our mother’s sister had become very ill, and while our parents went to her, Janice and I were invited to stay at the Barnes’ house until their return.

“We and the Barnes sisters became the best of friends right away, and spent the whole summer just exploring the country around Angel’s Ridge.

“On one of our afternoon excursions, we found a small, though steep cliff in a meadow not far from here that we had all to ourselves It seemed that no one else on earth knew of its existence, so we claimed it as our own and named it the ‘Glacier’.

Janie laughed, interrupting her teacher’s story. “I don’t believe you were allowed to play at the Glacier, or that you named it. Even grown-ups are afraid to go there. It’s haunted,” she finished, lowering her voice.

“Haunted by whom? Do you remember?” Mrs. Hoffman smiled.

Janie shook her head. “Who cares who the ghost is, so long as there is one? Do you know who the ghost is, Mrs. Hoffman?”

“Why sure,” she said. “The ghost is my sister, Janice.”

Janie’s eyes expanded and her mouth fell open. “What do you mean it’s your sister? I’ve never seen a ghost that looked anything like you before, Missus!”

“Well, Janie, that’s because you’ve never seen a ghost. Though I do agree with you, it’s a bunch of nonsense. And I’ll tell you the real reason no grown-ups go there.

“That same summer, the four of us were playing on the cliff when we heard a gun-shot and two men arguing. It seems, you see, that we were not the first to find the perfect hiding spot. There was a gang of thieves that had been hiding in the small hills below, and they were fighting over how they should ‘take care’ of us, since we’d found their hide-out.”

“Were you very scared?”

“Oh yes.” Mrs. Hoffman nodded. “We ran in different directions. Fauna was the only one who actually ran toward the house. I ended up in a bunch of bushes that turned out to be poison oak, but later, when she came back to get me with her mother and the police, we weren’t worried about my rash, because we couldn’t find Janice or Clara.

“We went home that night, because no matter how long and hard we searched, we couldn’t find them, and one of the police officers suggested that they might have run into town, and would come home later. But they never came home.

“We found Janice’s body discarded atop some rocks right next to the Glacier two days later. It was tragic, and matters only became worse when we realized that she had not fallen, but instead had been beaten to death.

“You see, because Clara’s body wasn’t there, Miss Abigail was sure that she must have escaped, and survived. For days she refused to leave the house, because she wanted to be there when her daughter returned. Days turned into weeks, and eventually she stopped pacing and began just standing at the window, waiting for her daughter to come home. The window there faces the Glacier, see?”

Janie nodded and glanced back at the house that was half hidden by the trees. “How does she eat?”

“Well, at first, Fauna stayed home from school to care for her, but later she wanted to get married and start a family of her own. She hired a maid to care for Miss Abigail, and she would still check in on her from time to time herself, even though Miss Abigail didn’t recognize her eldest daughter anymore.”

“Oh, how dreadful,” Janie said.

Mrs. Hoffman nodded. “I want you to meet me here tomorrow, for a special assignment. You see, I still visit her, and I want you to meet Miss Abigail for yourself. Then you can decide whether she’s crazy, or just very sad.”

“She won’t like me. I’ve been terrible to her.”

Mrs. Hoffman smiled, and patted Janie’s hand. “Your mother would have wanted you to meet her.”

“Well in that case . . .” Janie trailed off reluctantly, turning to look at the house again.

“Good.” Mrs. Hoffman stood and brushed off her skirt. “Ten o’clock then, and meet me around this way, I want to approach from her window.” Then she turned to leave.

“Wait!” Janie called, standing. “What happened to the other daughter? You said she died too.”

“Fauna?” Mrs. Hoffman asked gently. “She did pass away, but don’t worry, it was nothing like her sister’s death. She was sick, you see, and had already lived a good life. Before she died, she managed to get married too, and happily.”

“Did she have any children?”

Mrs. Hoffman took a breath and nodded. “Just one, she had a little girl that she named Janice after her childhood friend.”

Janie straightened and looked at her teacher in disbelief. “Do I know her, Mrs. Hoffman?”

“Well, you might. She’s near your age, but no one calls her Janice anymore. Everyone just calls her Janie.”